With the advent of personal address books on devices such as cell phone handsets and PDAs, subscribers can store the phone number of a contact using that contact's name, or any other designation the subscriber chooses. When the subscriber needs to call a contact, the subscriber simply searches through an alphabetical list of contacts in the personal address book, which lists the customized names of the subscriber's contacts. Many subscribers don't remember or even bother to learn the telephone numbers of the contacts in the subscriber's personal address book, since the subscriber just uses the personal address book on the device to search for a contact by name before placing a call or sending a message.
When a telephone subscriber receives a bill, a part of the bill is the usage section, which is a list of phone numbers that the subscriber dialed or received calls from during a billing period. Sometimes this list can be very long depending on phone usage. When a subscriber is not familiar with the phone numbers listed, it becomes very difficult to the subscriber to look at the usage section of the bill and recognize the calls made.
Attempts to solve this problem have met with limited success. Some solutions have proposed populating the phone bill with a name associated with the phone number. However, in existing systems, the names are pulled from a global address system, such as a phone company directory. In many cases, the global address system will list names, companies, or even numbers that do not correspond with the subscriber's knowledge of who was called or who called the subscriber. For example, phone company directories typically list the owner of a phone line, even though a different person may actually be using that line. In some cases, a company is listed in the global address system, even though the subscriber is making and receiving calls to an individual within that company. Additionally, large global address systems often have numerous errors and are infrequently updated, which makes the use of a global address system impractical.
Therefore, what is needed is a method for generating a personalized phone bill that provides accurate, personalized information to a subscriber to eliminate confusion on the phone bill.